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mercredi 10 août 2011

Pourquoi un tel contraste entre Volvo & Saab ?

[...] Now, contrast Volvo with my tour of Saab's factory about 50 miles away in the city of Trollhattan. Gunnar Brunius, a vice president at Saab, walks me through a dark and silent plant with cars sitting half-made on the assembly line.

Gunnar Brunnius: In the position where we are right now, we are not running production lines, and we are in a fairly tough situation.

Just over a year ago, General Motors sold Saab to a tiny Dutch carmaker named Spyker. But the company ran out of money to pay its suppliers and employees. And in April, work at the factory shut down. So how did these two iconic, Swedish carmakers end up in such different positions?

Hans Nyman: Ford gave Volvo freedom to find their own way. That is not the case with Saab.

Hans Nyman is with Automotive Sweden, which tracks the auto industry. He says it all goes back to the fact that Ford continued to invest in Volvo, developing stylish new models and the kind of innovative safety features Volvo is known for. General Motors stopped investing in Saab as a premium brand. Eventually, he says, it was simply mounting Saab car bodies on the same chassis used on any other GM models.

Nyman: So a bit of the Saab soul was lost on that journey.

Despite the company's troubles, Saab's Gunnar Brunius is still optimistic. After all, he notes, Saab has a very loyal fan club.

Brunnius: We have 11,000 orders on hand as has to be produced, and I think that is really something amazing. I mean the orders are still coming into the factory every day.